Vitalik Buterin Unveils Ethereum Roadmap Shift to Empower Personal Node Users

In Brief:

Vitalik proposes a plan to make self-hosted Ethereum nodes easier and more practical for everyday users.

Key updates include EIP-4444, partial stateless nodes, and a distributed history system using erasure coding.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has introduced a bold update to Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, aiming to make personal full node operation more accessible in a high-gas, Layer 1 environment. His proposal focuses on enhancing privacy, trustlessness, and decentralization—elements he says are increasingly compromised in centralized RPC-based infrastructure.

Buterin argues that while ZK-EVMs and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) offer cryptographic privacy, they still fall short of the censorship resistance and metadata protection enabled by fully self-hosted nodes.

A central piece of the new strategy is EIP-4444, which proposes reducing a node's historical data storage to just 36 days, significantly cutting disk space requirements. To preserve long-term data availability, Buterin suggests a distributed storage model using erasure coding, ensuring redundancy without relying on centralized entities.

Another breakthrough element is the introduction of partially stateless nodes. These nodes allow users to retain only the parts of the state they care about—such as select ERC-20 tokens or active dApps—while validating blocks statelessly. This hybrid model combines the efficiency of statelessness with the practicality and privacy of local data access.

Using on-chain configuration contracts, users can customize what their node retains without needing Merkle proofs, simplifying RPC interactions. Additionally, Buterin proposes adjusting gas prices to reduce execution costs while raising the cost of permanent state creation, aligning incentives with network sustainability.

While Ethereum’s base layer scalability is still a work in progress, this roadmap revision is a clear move to keep decentralized participation viable—ensuring that running a personal node remains relevant and achievable even as the ecosystem grows in complexity.

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